10 Unbelievably Bizarre Blunders

Mistakes are a universal part of life. Some are harmless slip-ups we laugh off, others spiral into chaos, triggering consequences we never imagined. A missed keystroke might cost a fortune. A wrong turn could lead to marriage with the wrong bride. A simple distraction might accidentally win someone $10 million. Whether they spark panic, legal trouble, or unexpected joy, blunders have a strange way of reshaping our lives—and sometimes the headlines.

This list explores ten unbelievable moments when human error took center stage. They range from hilarious to horrifying, revealing how fragile our best-laid plans can be when fate, foolishness, or sheer bad luck intervenes.

Related: 10 Times That an Innocent Mistake Led to a Tragic Outcome

10 A Whale of a Time

Imagine: one moment, you’re swimming 10 feet (3 m) above the bottom of the ocean, ready to harvest lobsters off the seafloor below; the next, enormous muscles squeeze, and you pass into utter darkness, swallowed by a whale!

That’s what happened to lobster diver Michael Packard, 56, one morning in June 2021, off Herring Cove Beach, near Provincetown, Massachusetts. He was certain that his sons, 12 and 15, would be left without their father.

Instead, the whale surfaced, shaking its head, and threw Packard back into the water, thus allowing his rescue. The accident wasn’t Packard’s; it was the whale’s, said Jooke Robbins, director of Humpback Whale Studies at the city’s Center for Coastal Studies, noting that the baleen whale species isn’t aggressive, especially to humans.

The freak mishap likely occurred when the whale opened its mouth to feed, causing its mouth to billow “out like a parachute, [and] blocking [its] forward vision,” writes Cape Cod Times reporter Doug Fraser, paraphrasing Robbins’s explanation. Although extremely unlikely, the incident happened; Packard’s soft tissue damage proved it, although, luckily, he didn’t break any bones.^[1]

9 Accounting Error

The $158,000 that a West Auckland, England, woman received due to an accounting error wasn’t her fault, but keeping the money and giving $64,000 of it to “a man linked to her” was her wrongdoing. In fact, the New Zealand Herald’s Lane Nichols reports that it could cost her and the man with whom she shared the money prison sentences.

Andrew Che Sit Bong, 78, a retired electrical engineer, used an old computer with a sticky keyboard to complete an online money transfer from a bank in the UK to his West Auckland Westpac account. Unknown to Che, one of the 15 keystrokes failed to register. Following normal protocols, he then added a zero to the suffix. As a result, he mistakenly transferred his life savings to the West Auckland woman’s bank account.

Initially, police balked at investigating the “civil matter,” but a Member of Parliament intervened on Che’s behalf. Both the woman and the man involved have been charged, and following “a prolonged battle for compensation,” the UK bank issued Che a full refund.^[2]

8 Wrong Venue

On April 4, 2021, a groom who showed up at an engagement ceremony, rather than his own wedding, nearly married a woman other than his intended. The befuddled groom blamed his incredible blunder on a Google Maps error. Equally bizarre is the fact that Ulfa, the woman to be engaged, didn’t know that a stranger had arrived in place of her beloved, whose party had been delayed on their way to the Magelang, Central Java, venue.

It wasn’t until a photographer showed Ulfa a photograph of the stranger and his family that she realized that something had gone wrong. She was shocked, she said, when she realized that she “did not know any of” the guests.

Discovering his error, the groom and his party departed with their gifts for the bride he was scheduled to marry, having obtained correct directions from other attendees of Ulfa’s engagement party. Despite the error, his bride married him, although Newsweek reporter Courtney Brogle states that “it was not immediately clear how the correct bride handled the news that he [had] nearly wed another woman.”^[3]

7 Unusually High Enrollment

The University of Kentucky’s enrollment has steadily climbed, with the total student body reaching 35,951 in 2024–2025.

In 2021, though, the admissions office was exceptionally generous, emailing acceptance notifications to more applicants than its entire student body—500,000, to be exact.

A follow-up message alerted the applicants for admission that a technical error had been responsible for the mistake; only “a handful of those on the prospect list [were] admitted,” a university spokesperson clarified, stating that apologies had been sent to the other candidates.^[4]

6 Wrong Lottery Ticket

In November 2021, LaQuedra Edwards invested $40 for a chance to win a fortune. Just as she was about to press the button to purchase the lottery ticket she’d selected in a grocery store vending machine, though, she said a rude person bumped into her. As a result, she pressed a different button, choosing a ticket other than the one she’d intended to select.

She wasn’t happy until, returning to her car, she scratched off the opaque material covering the ticket’s numbers and discovered that she’d purchased a winner.

Her ticket was worth $10 million! At first, she said, she didn’t believe her good luck. As she drove away on the freeway, she “kept looking down at [the ticket] and almost crashed [her] car,” she recalled. Even after her win had been confirmed, she was still in shock.^[5]

5 Successful Search Party

A man who went missing in Turkey needed to be found. His wife said that he’d gone drinking with friends, having afterward wandered off into a forest in the country’s Bursa province. When he’d failed to return home, she and his friends notified authorities, who dispatched a search party.

During the search, members of the party began to call out the missing man’s name. Mutlu, 50, responded, announcing, “I am here.” He and the others had searched for him for hours before Mutlu realized that he was the person for whom they were looking. He pleaded with a law officer not to punish him too harshly, assuring him that his father would “kill” him. Whether Mutlu was fined is unknown.^[6]

4 Missing Students

There were about 40 students in Professor Joseph Mullins’s class, but, as he mentioned in a post to Twitter (now X), “nobody showed up to [his] 8:15 class.” He emailed them. Two minutes later, a reply arrived: “Professor, we think you might be in the wrong room.” He updated his tweet: “So off I go to live in a hole forever.”

His wife thought he owed his students an explanation; she suggested that he advise them that the reason for his absentmindedness was that he’d gotten up at 4:00 a.m. to play Dungeons and Dragons with his Australian friends. He noted, further, that she was also absolutely roasting him about his reaction. Mullins’s tweet proved popular, garnering 14.5 million views.^[7]

3 IVF Mix-up

In 2019, Daphna and Alexander Cardinale received confirmation of their suspicion: a DNA test proved that months-old May was not their daughter. When they telephoned the in vitro fertilization clinic, they learned more astonishing news: May’s biological parents lived just 10 miles (16 km) away—and they also were raising the Cardinales’ biological daughter, Zoe. The couples struggled with whether to exchange the children they were rearing and with how to notify their own older children of their decision. Later, the Cardinales sued the IVF clinic, settling out of court.

The parents decided to swap the children and went to court to do so. At the same time, though, the Cardinales agreed with Annie’s mother that they should maintain contact with one another so that their respective daughters could visit. May and Annie attended the same school when they were young, and their families spent holidays together. The couples’ girls regarded one another as sisters. Essentially, the two families became a blended family, a state of affairs that continued, as reported in a 2024 story about the families.^[8]

2 Broadcaster’s Blunder

Broadcasters have been known to make big mistakes, but a May 20, 2025, blunder by Hu Die, a Chinese state news anchor who referred to both China and Taiwan as “countries,” was considered so egregious that Chinese officials had the comment “scrubbed” from the broadcasting network’s website and social media. After all, Die’s statement clearly contradicted China’s official view that Taiwan is a Chinese territory, not a country and its stance that, as such, Taiwan would be reclaimed, even if the use of force proved necessary to accomplish this end.

Die’s unintended slip prompted comments from both Joseph Wu, head of Taiwan’s National Security Council, and Chinese President Xi Jinping, the former describing Taiwan as “a democratic nation [that] will not allow China” to seize it and the latter insisting that “no one can ever stop China’s reunification.”

The government of Taiwan, officially known as the Republic of China, retreated to the island in 1949 after losing a civil war to communist forces. It has since operated as a sovereign state.^[9]

1 Unnecessary Rescue Attempt

Australian Nathan James Webber, 51, may have had good intentions. Still, his mistake, attributable, it seems, to his state of intoxication at the time, resulted in his arrest and could lead to his prosecution and deportation. Pattaya City police found him intoxicated and confused. Having heard voices, he thought that someone was trapped inside a rescue booth, but the voices were being transmitted over “the booth’s two-way radio. He smashed the glass in the booth’s door and tried to force the door open. Then, he realized his error and fled, leaving behind his motorcycle, which had broken down.

Webber confessed to having damaged the booth, as, in his intoxicated state, he’d tried to assist the non-existent person he’d believed was trapped. During their investigation, the police found that Webber had overstayed his Thai visa by nearly a year. As a result of his vandalism and visa overstay, it was likely that he would “face legal proceedings and eventual deportation.”^[10]